The rapid development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) within recent decades shows great potential for real-world society. The current ABSA works, however, are mostly limited to the scenario of a single text piece, leaving the study in dialogue contexts unexplored. To bridge the gap between fine-grained sentiment analysis and conversational opinion mining, in this work, we introduce a novel task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis, namely DiaASQ, aiming to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. We manually construct a large-scale high-quality DiaASQ dataset in both Chinese and English languages. We deliberately develop a neural model to benchmark the task, which advances in effectively performing end-to-end quadruple prediction, and manages to incorporate rich dialogue-specific and discourse feature representations for better cross-utterance quadruple extraction. We hope the new benchmark will spur more advancements in the sentiment analysis community.

In this paper, we present Chinese lexical fusion recognition, a new task which could be regarded as one kind of coreference recognition. First, we introduce the task in detail, showing the relationship with coreference recognition and differences from the existing tasks. Second, we propose an end-to-end model for the task, handling mentions as well as coreference relationship jointly. The model exploits the state-of-the-art contextualized BERT representations as an encoder, and is further enhanced with the sememe knowledge from HowNet by graph attention networks. We manually annotate a benchmark dataset for the task and then conduct experiments on it. Results demonstrate that our final model is effective and competitive for the task. Detailed analysis is offered for comprehensively understanding the new task and our proposed model.

Emotion detection in conversations (EDC) is to detect the emotion for each utterance in conversations that have multiple speakers. Different from the traditional non-conversational emotion detection, the model for EDC should be context-sensitive (e.g., understanding the whole conversation rather than one utterance) and speaker-sensitive (e.g., understanding which utterance belongs to which speaker). In this paper, we propose a transformer-based context- and speaker-sensitive model for EDC, namely HiTrans, which consists of two hierarchical transformers. We utilize BERT as the low-level transformer to generate local utterance representations, and feed them into another high-level transformer so that utterance representations could be sensitive to the global context of the conversation. Moreover, we exploit an auxiliary task to make our model speaker-sensitive, called pairwise utterance speaker verification (PUSV), which aims to classify whether two utterances belong to the same speaker. We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets, namely EmoryNLP, MELD and IEMOCAP. Results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.